Rick Warren

Rick Warren (1954 –  ) was the founder and senior pastor of (Baptist) Saddleback Church, a megachurch in the United States with a weekly attendance of 22,000. He resigned from the church in 2022 and took on the role of executive director of the “Finishing the Task” coalition, comprising Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant denominations  – its aim is to reach the whole world with the ‘gospel’ by 2033, which Warren believes is necessary before Jesus Christ can return. He is also a bestselling author. His most popular book The Purpose Driven Life, topped the Wall Street Journal best seller charts as well as Publishers Weekly charts, and was on the New York Times Bestseller List for over 90 weeks.  By 2019, 32 million copies had been sold in more than 85 languages.

Warren was named one of “America’s Top 25 Leaders” in 2005 by U.S. News and World Report. He was named by Time magazine as one of “15 World Leaders Who Mattered Most” in 2004, and one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2005 and again in 2009. In 2006, Newsweek called him one of “15 People Who Make America Great”. On his personal website it states that he “is recognized as America’s most influential spiritual leader”.

In May 2005 a survey of American pastors and ministers conducted by the Barna Group asked Christian leaders to identify what books were the most influential in their lives and ministries. The Purpose Driven Life topped the list (The Purpose Driven Church, written by Warren prior to The Purpose Driven Life, was second). Barna found that one-quarter of all American adults – and nearly two-thirds of evangelicals – had read The Purpose Driven Life.

Despite his influence and appeal, what many seem to be oblivious to, is his endorsement of spiritual formation; and the destructive force it is to the true gospel of Jesus Christ and the mystical and ecumenical road it forges. If you listen to Rick Warren, and follow his advice, you will find yourself drawn into the world of the Catholic mystics, and far removed from God and His Word.

 

Spiritual Formation

The Purpose Driven Church

Warren first promoted spiritual formation in The Purpose Driven Church. In it he wrote

“From time to time God has raised up a parachurch movement to reemphasize a neglected purpose of the church … [one such movement is the] Spiritual Formation/Discipleship Movement. A reemphasis on developing believers to full maturity has been the focus … authors such as … Richard Foster and Dallas Willard have underscored the importance of building up Christians and establishing personal spiritual disciplines… [this] movement has a valid message for the church … [it] has given the body a wake-up call.”

(Purpose Driven Church)

 An examination of the teachings of Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, shows that spiritual formation is sourced from Catholic mysticism.

 

Richard Foster

Richard Foster (1942- ) is a member of the Quakers (also known as the Religious Society of Friends). He was a professor at Friends University and pastor of Evangelical Friends churches. Foster is regarded as the ‘father’ of the Spiritual Formation Movement within evangelical churches. His book Celebration of Discipline : The Path to Spiritual Growth (1978) is the recommended text on spiritual formation and has sold more than two and a half million copies. It was selected by Christianity Today as one of the top ten books of the 20th century. The extent of Foster’s influence is astounding. You will be hard pressed to find a Bible college or seminary across all denominations that doesn’t offer a course on spiritual formation.

 

The Quakers

In most Quaker churches today, the major doctrines of sin, repentance and salvation are all denied. The Bible is viewed as one amongst many books of inspiration. Satan is said to be an imaginative figure and Jesus Christ just a very good man. Modern Quakers specialise in doing good works and encouraging peace initiatives. (An exception is the Evangelical Friends Church International which adopted the principal beliefs of the historical Protestant faith. Foster has ties with EFCI, but clearly has moved away from historic Protestantism and towards the views of the liberal Quaker majority.)

George Fox, the founder of the Quakers said,

“I was glad that I was commanded to turn people to that inward light, spirit, and grace, by which all might know their salvation, and their way to God; even that divine Spirit which would lead them into all Truth, and which I infallibly knew would never deceive any.”

(The Journal of George Fox).

A Quaker’s spiritual life is influenced by the subjective “inner light”. This is the very essence of Quakerism. And this belief, of an “inner light” in every person, is seen throughout Foster’s writings – the key element being  contemplative prayer by which a person experiences the “inner light”.

This foundational Quaker doctrine is rank heresy. It means that there is a divine guidance and therefore a divine presence in every living person. Fox himself used the expression “that of God in everyone.” (Statement of 1656, The Works of George Fox, 1831).  This is the heresy of pantheism – that ‘god’ is in everyone. This belief is invariably coupled with universalism – that everyone goes to heaven, irrespective of what they believe or do; and there is no such thing as hell – which is just what liberal Quaker’s believe.

 

Foster begins Celebration of Discipline by describing the spiritual disciplines that he wishes to teach his readers. He writes: 

“The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths. They invite us to explore the inner caverns of the spiritual realm.” (p. 1)

 

The “classical Disciplines” Foster states are the spiritual exercises of the ancient Catholic mystics – including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis de Sale and Ignatius Loyola – and Thomas Merton (an American Trappist monk). Foster believes these mystics discovered the key to true spiritual life. He called them the “masters of the interior life”. As such, Foster has taken Catholic mysticism and merely repackaged it for an unsuspecting modern audience.

See  Catholic Mystics     Thomas Merton    Spiritual Disciplines/Exercises                 

 

In Celebration of Discipline Foster explains his view of the inner world: 

“We must be willing to go down into the recreating silences, into the inner world of contemplation. In their writings, all of the masters of meditation strive to awaken us to the fact that the universe is much larger than we know, that there are vast unexplored inner regions that are just as real as the physical world we know so well… They call us to the adventure, to be pioneers in this frontier of the Spirit.” (p 13)

 

Throughout his writings over the years, Foster talks about and promotes these “masters of meditation”. Two of Foster’s books, Spiritual Classics and Devotional Classics essentially gather the writings of pantheists (god is in everyone), universalists (everyone goes to heaven irrespective of what they believe or do, there is no hell) and mystics (we can only really experience ‘God’ through mystical practices). These are all heretical ideas and totally opposed to the Bible’s teaching.  Foster identifies more of these “masters of meditation” on his website in “100 Spiritual Classics.” The list includes mystics and pantheists like Meister Eckhart and Tilden Edwards.  

In Foster’s book Meditative Prayer he writes that the purpose of this type of prayer – commonly known as contemplative prayer – is to create a “spiritual space” or “inner sanctuary” through “specific meditation exercises” (p9). Foster identifies several mystics in the book whom he claims reveal to us these crucial exercises: Madame Guyon, Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, Henri Nouwen, and Thomas Merton.  (See  Henri Nouwen .) Foster explains the contemplative process in three steps. He says:

“The first step [into meditative prayer] is sometimes called “centering down” … Others have used the term re-collection; that is, a re-collecting of ourselves until we are unified or whole. The idea is to let go of all competing distractions until we are truly centered, until we are truly present where we are.” (p9)

 

The second step of meditation, is “the inward gaze of the heart upon the divine Center”. Foster says that fourteenth-century mystic Richard Rolle experienced “physical sensations” (p17) in this “gaze of the heart”.  But reassures “Few if any of us will have the physical sensations that Rolle experienced”. (p18) (Note: This is known in Eastern mysticism as “kundalini”.)

In step three, this is where the practitioner is actively “listening” to ‘God’. Once the meditative exercises have been implemented “quieting all physical, emotional and psychological senses”:

“At the center of our being we are hushed. The experience is more profound than mere silence… it is a listening silence…Something deep inside has been awakened and brought to attention. Our spirit is on tiptoe, alert and listening.”

 

Now the realm has been entered where the voice of ‘God’ can be heard.

However, this ecstatic state is nothing more than an altered state of consciousness. His three steps are the core practice of Catholic mysticism, Eastern mysticism, the occult and the New Age. It is entirely absent from the Bible’s teaching on prayer.    ( See     Contemplative Prayer .)

In his book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, Foster answers the question “What is the goal of Contemplative Prayer?”:

“To this question the old writers answer with one voice: union with God. Bonaventure, a follower of Saint Francis, says that our final goal is ‘union with God,’ which is a pure relationship where we see ‘nothing’.”

 

According to the Bible we are united to God only through repentance and faith in Christ. God comes to dwell within us when we are born again, such that our body is described in an extraordinary way as the “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19).  ‘Union with God’ does not come about by practising contemplative prayer. This practice only leads to union with demonic spirits.1 John 3:24 declares : “And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.”  The Spirit of God unites Himself with our spirit the moment that we are born again.

Foster’s ultimate agenda is to unite all ‘faiths’ in the common practice of this form of mysticism. He writes: “[Jesus] showed us God’s yearning for the gathering of an all-inclusive community of loving persons.” (p5) 

Foster defines more of what he means by “all-inclusive” in his book Streams of Living Water when he says this “all-inclusive community” includes everything from a “Catholic monk” to a “Baptist evangelist”: 

“I see a Catholic monk from the hills of Kentucky standing alongside a Baptist evangelist from the streets of Los Angeles and together offering up a sacrifice of praise.” (p.274)

 

(The only place in “the hills of Kentucky” where Catholic monks live is the Gethsemani Abbey, a Trappist monastery. This was the home base of Thomas Merton. See  Thomas Merton .)

 

Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard (1935 – 2013) was ordained a Southern Baptist minister but left the ministry to pursue an academic career. He was a Professor of Philosophy at The University of Southern California and well known advocate of Spiritual Formation. In his book Spirit of the Disciplines, Willard identified the spiritual disciplines as the “yoke” of Jesus – in this he completely misrepresented Matthew 11:28-30 where Jesus declared:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

 

There is absolutely no hint within these verses of Jesus commanding the practice of the spiritual disciplines. To the contrary, it is best understood that Jesus was implicitly referring to the yoke of religious duty that the Jewish leaders (“the wise and learned” referred to in Matthew 11:25) bound the people to under the Law. They taught the requirements – as they saw them – to achieve righteousness and right-standing with God. This yoke made people “weary and burdened“. In Luke 11:46 Jesus condemned them “… you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” In contrast, however, the yoke of Jesus was “easy” and His “burden … light“, because faith in Jesus and the introduction of the New Covenant by His blood overturned the religious requirements of the Law and abolished the priesthood. Thus, Willard turned the meaning of the verse on its head, making it the very opposite of Jesus’ intention, bringing people back under the yoke of religious duty and setting up a new priesthood comprising the Catholic mystics. (Note: One of the hallmarks of Catholicism is a priesthood with the Pope at its head, who dictate to members of the Catholic church the requirements – as they see them – to be made acceptable to God.) In this regard, Willard wrote:

“The disciplines are activities of the mind and body purposely undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order.”

 

So in like fashion to those whom Jesus condemned, Willard imposed the spiritual disciplines of the Catholic mystics as the means by which we achieve right-standing with God, “the divine order”.

Willard was critical of traditional Protestant doctrine because it failed to preserve the disciplines which he claims are necessary to achieve Christian maturity and were a vital part of the early church. He decried:

“It [Protestantism] precluded ‘works’ and Catholicism’s ecclesiastical sacraments as essential for salvation, but it continued to lack any adequate account for what human beings do to become, by the grace of God, the kind of people Jesus obviously calls them to be.”

 

And he asserted:

“Salvation as conceived today ( in Protestantism) is far removed from what it was in the beginnings of Christianity and only by correcting it can God’s grace in salvation be returned to the concrete, embodied existence of our human personalities walking with Jesus in his easy yoke.”

 

However, the spiritual disciplines that he described as Christ’s “easy yoke” are completely absent from the Bible! He argued that although there was no list of disciplines provided, the Apostle “Paul’s teaching … strongly suggest that he understood and practised something vital about the Christian life that we have lost—and that we must do our best to recover.” Contrary to Willard’s assertion, the Apostle Paul expressly spoke against such practices in Colossians 2:20-23:

“Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”?  These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.“

 

The ascetic spiritual disciplines identified by Willard – which he attributed to and sourced from the Catholic mystics, because the Bible was silent – fall exactly within this denunciation. They include voluntary exile, night vigils refusing sleep, Sabbath keeping, physical labour, solitude, fasting, study, and prayer. Willard lists “disciplines of abstinence” (solitude, silence, fasting, frugality, chastity, secrecy and sacrifice) and “disciplines of engagement” (study, worship, celebration, service, prayer, fellowship, confession and submission). In his discussion of these Willard cites the mystics including Thomas Merton, Thomas à Kempis and Henri Nouwen. It is from this polluted well of false teaching that Willard draws up his list, rediscovering the so-called “lost” spiritual disciplines.

   

The Purpose Driven Life

Warren continued the promotion of spiritual formation in his subsequent book The Purpose Driven Life. In a 2013 interview with Friar John Parker, the head of the Department of Evangelization of the Orthodox Church in America, Warren reiterated his belief that the Evangelical church needed to embrace spiritual formation as practised in the Orthodox church, and its connection with his book The Purpose Driven Life:

 

Pastor Warren: “Years ago … Metr. Jonah [the head of the Orthodox Church in America] was there, we just struck up a friendship instantly, and we began to talk about what I felt I could learn from the Orthodox, and he began to talk about what he felt they could learn from the Evangelicals, and we thought, “Let’s be in a matter of prayer on this…”

Fr. John: Tell me, according to the conversation with Metr. Jonah, what would be, in your mind, something that Saddleback or the wider Evangelical world could gain from Orthodox Christianity.

Pastor Warren: The number one thing Evangelicals need to learn from Orthodox is spiritual formation. I would say they can help us on spiritual formation, and we can help them on evangelism. I said, “If you’ll teach me about spiritual formation, I’ll teach you everything I know about reaching contemporary Americans.”

 

And Warren went on to explain his purpose in writing The Purpose Driven Life, and the principal influence he drew from:

Pastor Warren: “When I wrote Purpose-Driven Life, the six months prior to that, I didn’t read any contemporary books. I went back, and I was reading 500-year-old books and 1,000-year-old books, and I was reading things like Imitation of Christ, and Practice of the Presence of [God] by Brother Lawrence, and St. John of the Cross, and the Desert Fathers, and Athanasian Fathers. I was reading these, and I’m thinking, “How do you create a book that lasts 500 years? or in their case, 2,000? a few thousand years?”

I asked Metr. Jonah to introduce me to some Orthodox works, so I read the great book On the Holy Spirit, and other books, so those are deeply moving to me. I’m filling my mind with ancient faith, and then saying, “How can I say this to somebody who last year was watching MTV?” Do you know what I’m saying?”

(https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordsendme/a_conversation_with_rick_warren)

 

 “Ancient Faith” Authors

The authors of “ancient faith” expressly cited by Warren all promote what is understood now as spiritual formation, the ultimate goal of which is to experience ‘union’ with God and the achievement of ‘Christian maturity’.

 

The Imitation of Christ was written by Thomas à Kempis in the 15th century and is regarded as the most important devotional work in the Catholic Church. Apart from the Bible no book has been translated into more languages than the Imitation of Christ. Kempis was an ascetic monk and mystic. The essence of the book is how to achieve union with God, through purgation and illumination: purging oneself from the world and its influences; and, being illuminated by devotion to prayer, meditation and solitude. The book emphasises the Eucharist – the literal appearance of the body and blood of Jesus through the sacrament – as the means of that union. It is the classic on the ‘interior life of the soul’, and is perhaps quoted by advocates for spiritual formation/contemplative prayer more than any other book. It was used by Ignatius Loyola as a foundational book in training his order of Jesuits.

 

The Practice of the Presence of God is a book of collected teachings of Brother Lawrence, a 17th century Carmelite friar. (Carmelites were a Catholic order of both priests and nuns, characterised by asceticism and mysticism.) The basic theme of the book is how to develop an awareness of the continual presence of God.

 

John of the Cross was also a 17th century Carmelite friar. He was a principal figure in the (Spanish) Counter-Reformation, a mystic, one of thirty-six Doctors of the Catholic Church and a canonized saint.  He was tutored by an older Carmelite nun, Teresa of Avila (who practised rigid asceticism, severe mortification including self-flagellation and experienced ecstatic visions while in a trance during which she was observed by others to have levitated). He is most noted for his description of the journey of the soul into union with God, through the process he called “the dark night”; again, using the preliminary steps as prescribed by Kempis of purgation and illumination. Teresa of Avilia and John of the Cross, are principal figures in defining contemplative prayer to be the essential practice to experience union with God.

 

The Desert Fathers – Beginning in the 3rd century with Antony the Great and continuing through to the 6th century, the Desert Fathers were a particular group of monks who sought to achieve ‘Christian’ perfection by living the life of an ascetic hermit in the desert regions of the middle East (mainly Egypt and Syria). As their numbers swelled and many people travelled to them seeking religious guidance, they developed the very first monastic communities. They are characterised by the mystical means they employed to experience ‘God’ called Hesychasm. The word Hesychasm comes from the Greek word for “stillness, rest, quiet and silence”. It was a means of prayer by which the mind was stilled and interior silence was achieved, in the exact same fashion as Eastern meditation (and it is very likely that they learned this method from contact with Hindus and/or Buddhists).  The Orthodox Church in America explains the hesychast method as follows:

“In the hesychast method of prayer the person sits alone in a bodily position with his head bowed and his eyes directed toward his chest or his stomach. He continually repeats the [Jesus] prayer* with each aspiration and breath, placing his “mind in his heart” by concentrated attention. He empties his mind of all rational thoughts and discursive reasoning, and also voids his mind of every picture and image. Then, without thought or imagination, but with all proper attention and concentration he rhythmically repeats the Jesus Prayer in silence—hesychia means silence—and through this method of contemplative prayer is united to God by the indwelling of Christ in the Spirit. According to the fathers, such a prayer, when faithfully practiced within the total life of the Church, brings the experience of the uncreated divine light of God and unspeakable joy to the soul. Its purpose is to make man a servant of God.”

* The Jesus Prayer is the phrase ““Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

(https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-almsgiving/meditation)

 

Contrary to claim that “through this method of contemplative prayer [a person] is united to God”, what is achieved is an altered state of consciousness, and the door has been opened to contact with the demonic spirit realm. It is wholly unbiblical and  the domain of mysticism and occultism. We are united to God, through faith in Christ and the new birth, not by stilling the mind.

(Note: The hesychast method of prayer is more commonly referred to as “breath prayer” – see below.)

 

Athanasian Fathers – Athanasius (the Great) was a 4th century bishop and is regarded as the Father of Orthodoxy in the Orthodox Church, and is also acknowledged in the Catholic Church as one of the four great Eastern Doctors. He was instrumental in the acceptance and promotion of the Desert Fathers and, consequently, when the Roman Emperor Constantine declared that Christianity was to be adopted as the state religion during the time of Althanasia, it was this form of ‘Christianity’ which became the standard:

 

“Athanasius introduced into Rome the knowledge and practice of the monastic life; and a school of this new philosophy was opened by the disciples of Antony, who accompanied their primate to the holy threshold of the Vatican. The strange and savage appearance of these Egyptians [i.e. Desert Fathers from the desert region of Egypt, who looked bedraggled and emaciated because of their severe lifestyle] excited, at first, horror and contempt, and, at length, applause and zealous imitation. The senators, and more especially the matrons, transformed their palaces and villas into religious houses; and the narrow institution of six Vestals was eclipsed by the frequent monasteries, which were seated on the ruins of ancient temples and in the midst of the Roman Forum.”

(The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon)

 

(Note: The Catholic Church was formally divided into two distinct entities in 1054AD. The western region retained the name Roman Catholic Church, whereas the eastern region became known as the Orthodox Catholic Church. Although there are some differences between these two Churches, they remain very similar in beliefs and practices. In particular, they both maintain that salvation is achieved through a person’s own works, especially faithfulness in keeping the sacraments, not by faith alone and the new birth.

The Catholic Church looks not only to the Desert Fathers but also the long line of Catholic mystics – which include Thomas à Kempis and John of the Cross – whereas, the Orthodox Church draws principally only from the Desert Fathers and Athanasius.)

 

Warren’s express reason, therefore, was to write a book that would last centuries or millennia that mimicked the writings of the ancient mystics. He would draw the readers of The Purpose Driven Life into Spiritual Formation/Disciplines and they would discover ‘union with God’, and achieve ‘Christian’ maturity. His intended audience, however, would be quiet reticent to an open and overt endorsement of the Orthodox church’s ancient Spiritual Formation and a guide to its ascetic and mystical practices/disciplines (he wanted “somebody who last year was watching MTV” to understand the “ancient faith”). So Warren wove its principals – purgation, illumination and union – into what appears at the outset a self-help book to reduce stress and get more out of life; couched in conventional Biblical concepts:

[The book begins] “This is more than a book; it is a guide to a 40-day spiritual journey that will enable you to discover the answer to life’s most important question: What on earth am I here for? By the end of this journey you will know God’s purpose for your life and will understand the big picture-how all the pieces of your life fit together. Having this perspective will reduce your stress, simplify your decisions, increase your satisfaction, and, most important, prepare you for eternity.”

 

The ultimate objective was expressed by him not as the mystics “union with God”, but to become “best friends with God”. Warren was guarded in what he communicated and how he communicated it. Thus, Warren’s book is a rather a bridge into spiritual formation. People who come under the influence of Warren, will find themselves directed into the ascetic and mystical practices of the Catholic mystics and spiritual formation/disciplines, as they look beyond the book, and search out who and what it endorses. Warren writes:

“It’s difficult to imagine how an intimate friendship is possible between an omnipotent, invisible, perfect God and a finite, sinful human being. It’s easier to understand a Master-servant relationship or a Creator-creation relationship or even Father-child. But what does it mean when God wants me as a friend? By looking at the lives of God’s friends in the Bible, we learn six secrets of friendship with God…”

 

 Breath Prayer

The very first secret Warren reveals is “through constant conversation”. Warren writes in this regard:

“The Bible tells us to “pray all the time”. How is it possible to do this? One way is to use “breath prayers” throughout the day, as many Christians have done for centuries. You choose a brief sentence or a simple phrase that can be repeated to Jesus in one breath… Pray it as often as possible so it is rooted deep in your heart.”

 

Warren here expressly encourages the adoption of the hesychast method of prayer or breath prayer (although his explanation is veiled). Richard Foster explains the origins of “breath prayer” in his book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home:

“As Christians over the centuries have sought to follow the biblical injunction to ‘pray without ceasing,’ they have developed two fundamental expressions of Unceasing Prayer…. [One] has its origin in the Eastern Christian hesychastic tradition and is usually called aspiratory prayer or breath prayer … the concept arose of a short, simple prayer of petition that can be spoken in one breath, hence the name ‘breath prayer’.”

 

Foster goes on to describe the end result of breath prayer in which he claims union with God is achieved:

“Sometimes … we reach a point beyond this prayer where we are stilled within and without … This is a point where we let go of our labour and be with God.”

 

Again, contrary to Foster’s claim, what is achieved is an altered state of consciousness, whereby a person – though perhaps unwittingly and unintentionally – has opened themselves up to encounter the demonic realm, because they have disengaged their mind and placed their will into a state of dormancy.

The second type of unceasing prayer, Foster identifies as “more conversational and spontaneous” and associates with “such practitioners of prayer as Brother Lawrence (The Practice of the Presence of God)…”. Warren follows Foster and endorses Brother Lawrence:

“The classic book on learning how to develop a constant conversation with God is Practicing the Presence of God. It was written in the seventeenth century by Brother Lawrence…”

(The Purpose Driven Life)

 

 Modern Advocates of Contemplative Prayer Cited by Warren in The Purpose Driven Life

 

Gary Thomas

Warren favourably quotes an advocate of centering/contemplative prayer Gary Thomas, whom he calls “his friend”. Thomas writes in his book Sacred Pathways:

“It is particularly difficult to describe this type of prayer in writing, as it is best taught in person. In general however, centering prayer works like this: Choose a word (Jesus or Father, for example) as a focus for contemplative prayer. Repeat the word silently in your mind for a set amount of time (say, twenty minutes) until your heart seems to be repeating the word by itself, just as naturally and involuntarily as breathing.”

(Sacred Pathways)

This is the use of a ‘Christian’ mantra to disengage and still the mind, in the exact same fashion that a Hindu or Buddhist uses a ‘secret’ mantra. And just as a Hindu or Buddhist engages the (demonic) spirit realm through this means so does the naive ‘Christian’ who is beguiled into thinking they are connecting with ‘God’.

 

(In his book Sacred Marriage, Thomas references and quotes numerous times from a book Conjugal Spiritualty written by an advocate of tantric sex, Mary Anne McPherson Oliver. Tantric sex is found in ancient Hindu texts called Tantra – these texts contain mystical and magical, rituals and secrets. Some deal with taking the energies experienced in meditation – arising out of the energy centres called chakras located in the human spine – and combining them with love-making to enhance sexual experiences. In Conjugal Spirituality, McPherson Oliver discusses these: “Indian Tantric Yoga tradition … spoken of as kundalini potential energy”. She tells readers to induce the tantric state by using mantras and breath prayers during the sexual experience. McPherson Oliver writes that “mystical experiences can be associated with erotic love.” She describes public sexual ceremonies in which couples practice “Taoist visualizations and meditations, accompanied by breathing exercises” and talks of “[i]nvoking the gods and goddesses.” And writes  that “sexual union celebrated [is] an eschatological sign of God’s kingdom where all will be one”.)

 

Henri Nouwen

Warren also favourably quotes Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen. Nouwen was deeply involved in contemplative mysticism. Nouwen claimed that the silence within contemplative meditation is necessary for intimacy with God:

“Silence protects the inner fire, guards the inner heat of religious emotions, the life of the Holy Spirit within us.  Thus, silence is the discipline by which the inner fire of God is tended and kept alive.”

(The Way of the Heart)

 

He taught that the use of an Eastern-style mantra could take the practitioner into God’s presence:

“The quiet repetition of a single word can help us to descend with the mind into the heart … This way of simple prayer … opens us to God’s active presence.”

(The Way of the Heart)

 

He saw that mysticism and contemplative prayer would create an ecumenical unity because Christian leaders learn to hear “the voice of love”:

“Through the discipline of contemplative prayer, Christian leaders have to learn to listen to the voice of love. … For Christian leadership to be truly fruitful in the future, a movement from the moral to the mystical is required.”

(In the Name of Jesus)

 

As is typical, Nouwen’s involvement with mysticism led him to a form of universalism (everyone goes to heaven) and panentheism (God is in all things):

“The God who dwells in our inner sanctuary is the same as the one who dwells in the inner sanctuary of each human being.”

(Here and Now)

 

“Prayer is ‘soul work’ because our souls are those sacred centers where all is one … It is in the heart of God that we can come to the full realization of the unity of all that is.”

(Bread for the Journey)

 

In his final book Nouwen described his universalist doctrine as follows:

“Today I personally believe that while Jesus came to open the door to God’s house, all human beings can walk through that door, whether they know about Jesus or not. Today I see it as my call to help every person claim his or her own way to God.”

(Sabbatical Journey)

 

 

Other Authors Warren Quotes

 

Other persons Warren quoted favourably (i.e. without qualification or warning of their aberrant beliefs) in The Purpose Driven Life, who are antagonistic to the truth and the gospel of Jesus Christ include:

 

  • Bernie Siegel – a New Age leader. Siegel has a spirit-guide named George. The very first time Siegel engaged in meditation, it was:

 “to find and meet an inner guide…I met George, a bearded, long-haired young man wearing an immaculate flowing white gown and skullcap … George was … an excellent advisor … he has been my invaluable companion ever since his first appearance.”

(Love, Medicine and Miracles)

 

  • C. S. Lewis – was not a Christian in a true Biblical sense, although many believe he is the best modern apologist for Christianity. His own belief system was a mix of philosophy, mythology, paganism, mysticism, Theosophy, Catholicism, and High Anglicanism. In his autobiography, Lewis explained how he had been influenced as a teenager by a school matron who introduced him to the occult:

“And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since—the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean … It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting …”

 

Mysticism, the occult and Christian themes are woven together by Lewis in his fantasy novels, e.g. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Unbeknown to many Christians, Lewis did not write his novels as Biblical allegories:

“Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then . . . drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out “allegories” to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.”

(Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said)

 

Effectively, Lewis wed paganism with Christian concepts and themes, thereby corrupting the truth of God’s Word.

“It is only since I have become a Christian that I have learned really to value the elements of truth in Paganism and Idealism. I wished to value them in the old days; now I really do. Don’t suppose that I ever thought myself that certain elements of pantheism were incompatible with Christianity or with Catholicism.”

(Letter to Bede Griffiths)

 

(Note: Warren quotes more from C.S. Lewis than any other author.)

See  C. S. Lewis   

 

  • Anais Nin – was an international feminist icon and regarded as one of the greatest authors of female erotica.

 

  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer – was a neo-orthodox Catholic theologian (and famous Nazi dissenter) who denied or questioned nearly every major doctrine of the historic Protestant-Christian faith. Neo-orthodoxy holds to the view that the history recorded in the Bible never really happened. The Bible, according to neo-orthodoxy is not infallible and inerrant truth but rather merely contains principles of truth and, therefore, it is open to subjective interpretation. The Bible is not revelation given by God to men by inspiration, but rather men’s personal understanding of what they perceived to be ‘God’. Bonhoeffer asserted:

 “What are we to think of other religions? Are they as nothing compared to Christianity? We answer that the Christian religion as religion is not of God. It is rather another example of a human way to God, like the Buddhist and others, too, though of course these are of a different nature. Christ is not the bringer of a new religion, but rather the one who brings good. Therefore, as an impossible way from the human to God, the Christian religion stands with other religions. The Christian can never pride himself on his Christianity, for it remains human, all too human.” 

(Sermon entitled “Jesus Christ, and the Essence of Christianity”, Testimony to Freedom)

 

  • Mother Teresa – was a Catholic nun and renowned humanitarian. She believed in pantheism (God is in everything) and universalism (everybody is saved and will go to heaven when they die):

“God is not separate from the Church as He is everywhere and in everything and we are all His children — Hindu, Muslim, or Christians.”

(Mother Teresa: A Simple Path) 

 

“Death is nothing but a continuation of life…. Every religion has got eternity — another life…. If it was properly explained that death was nothing but going home to God, then there would be no fear. … We live… so that they may go home according to what is written in the book, be it written according to Hindu, or Muslim, or Buddhist, or Catholic, or Protestant or any other belief.”

(Mother Teresa: Her people and Her Work)

 

Warren’s Spiritual Director

Typically in spiritual formation, a person recognises and looks to a “spiritual director”* for guidance. Warren acknowledges his own spiritual director, in the interview with Friar John Parker:

Pastor Warren: Jamin Goggin is my spiritual director on staff here at the church. He actually grew up at Saddleback Church along with my son, used to swim in my backyard, went off and did his advanced degrees with college and university and seminary, and has co-written a new book called, Reading the Ancients. It’s a terrific book. It’s making the ancients accessible to modern readers, so it gives them in bite-sized pieces, but it’s a good book, printed by InterVarsity Press.

Fr. John: I’d like to see that.

Pastor Warren: He is the spiritual director, and actually he’s doing a retreat this week while we’re doing the conference. It’s a “Surrender” retreat. It’s a very powerful [one]. My family has actually gone through it together.

 

In the introduction to Reading the  Spiritual Classics: A Guide for Evangelicals, Goggin together with co-editor Kyle Stroebel – an associate professor at Talbot’s Institute for Spiritual Formation, Biola University – begin by acknowledging and praising Richard Foster’s ground-breaking work, and explain their purpose in their book is to encourage an ‘evangelical’ interpretation of the Catholic mystics, the source of Foster’s ideas:  

“Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, first published in 1978, created a new fervor within the evangelical church for a deeply historic spirituality. Foster’s attempt to thread historic spirituality through spiritual practice, if nothing else, led to a renaissance of spirituality within the evangelical church in America. What was initially implicit was made explicit when Foster edited Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups. This is a compilation of excerpts from spiritual classics … Foster and his partner Dallas Willard are the most prominent figures in the retrieval of spiritual classics among the evangelicals. But they are by no means alone. Carl Trueman, dean of [Reformed/Calvinist] Westminster Theological Seminary, states, “I think the medieval mystics should form a staple of the literary diet of all thoughtful Christians … this volume addresses the key questions regarding spiritual classics that will lead to an informed, spiritual and distinctively evangelical [their emphasis] reading of these difficult texts.”

 

Goggin and Stroebel as advocates of spiritual formation defined by the ancient mystics, are necessarily active promoters of contemplative prayer. In his book Formed for the Glory of God: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards, Stroebel (improperly) redefines Jonathan Edwards to be in support of spiritual formation and writes:

”…meditation and contemplation are at the heart of the Christian life.”

 

Contemplative prayer is the essential practice to experience union with God in the Spiritual Formation Movement. Tragically, those who practice contemplative prayer are led away from the true gospel of Jesus Christ, and into the arms of pantheism and universalism. The spiritual guidance they receive in the state of contemplation, though claimed by advocates of spiritual formation to be from the Spirit of God, is from Satan who leads them away from the narrow way that leads to life, and onto the broad way that leads to destruction.

 

*Foster writes in Celebration of Discipline concerning the role of the spiritual director in spiritual formation. The origin of the spiritual director was found in the Roman Catholic mystics, the very first being the Desert Fathers:

“In the Middle Ages not even the greatest saints attempted the depths of the inward journey without the help of a spiritual director. Today the concept is hardly understood, let alone practiced, except in the Roman Catholic monastic system…

Many of the first spiritual directors were the desert Fathers and were held in high regard for their ability to “discern spirits.” People would often travel for miles in the wilderness just to hear a brief word of advice, a “word of salvation,” which summed up the will and judgment of God for them in their actual concrete situation. The Apophthegmata or “Sayings of the Fathers” is an eloquent testimony to the simplicity and depth of this spiritual guidance. Also, many of the Cistercian laybrothers in twelfth- century England were distinguished for their ability to read and guide souls.”

Foster laments that the concept was not part of the Protestant church, but there is good reason. The “ability to read and guide souls” is not represented in the Bible. Of course, it is readily recognised as that practised in Eastern religion by the tradition of gurus:

“At an individual level in Hinduism, the Guru is many things, including being a teacher of skills, a counselor, one who helps in the birth of mind and realization of one’s soul, who instils values and experiential knowledge, an exemplar, an inspiration and who helps guide a student’s (śiṣya) spiritual development.”

(Wikipedia definition)

This function of a guru in Hinduism is exactly the same function of the spiritual director in spiritual formation. Foster writes:

“He is the means of God to open the path to the inward teaching of the Holy Spirit …He leads only by the force of his own personal holiness …”

A spiritual director advises how to further advance the “inward journey” and they themselves “have gone further into the divine Center than others …” The divine Center is the Eastern and New Age concept of the ‘god’ within every person.

The practical advice spiritual directors typically give, in order to move closer to the divine Center, is the use of the spiritual disciplines, again derived from the lives and teachings of the Catholic mystics.

 

Saddleback Church

Saddleback church (Rick Warren’s megachurch) has a Retreat Centre “where you can go to pursue spiritual growth, rest, and renewal through affordable retreat programs.” On the church’s website, there are four retreat documents made available to assist and enable participants to engage in a personal retreat. In Personal Spiritual Retreat Guide, the meditation practices of visualisation and hand postures are taught. In Silence and Solitude, the meditation technique of rhythmic breathing, in order to silence the mind, is explained.

 

Visualization

 

“Imagine that you are standing before Jesus as he is hanging on the cross. Imagine the pain Jesus is experiencing. Picture the crown of thorns upon his head. Picture the wounds on his body. Remember the truth that he knew no sin, and yet willingly went to the cross to take the sin of the world upon himself (2 Corinthians 5:21). As you imagine the scene, physically kneel before the cross.”

(Personal Spiritual Retreat Guide, Saddleback Church

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/sb-web/saddleback.com/learn/retreat-ministry/spiritual-retreat-guide.pdf)

 

Visualization using the power of the imagination is never taught in the scriptures. It is a practice known in Taoism and Tibetan meditation, and Kabbalah, witchcraft and the occult. Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuits – a Catholic military order established to counter the Protestant Reformation) made visualization a key element of his contemplative exercises. Richard Foster in his book Celebration of Discipline advises the use of the imagination:

“As with meditation, the imagination is a powerful tool in the work of prayer.” 

 

Foster also recommends the use of the imagination to induce an out-of-body experience – known in the New Age and witchcraft as astral projection/travelling:

“In your imagination allow your spiritual body, shining with light, to rise out of your physical body. Look back so that you can see yourself … and reassure your body that you will return  … Go deeper and deeper into outer space until there is nothing except the warm presence of the eternal Creator. Rest in His presence. Listen quietly, anticipating the unanticipated. Note carefully any instruction given … When it is time for you to leave, audibly thank the Lord for His goodness and return.” 

(Celebration of Discipline)

 

And Foster also references Loyola with regard to visualization:

“Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises constantly encouraged his readers to visualize the gospel stories. Every contemplation he gave was designed to open the imagination. He even included a meditation entitled ‘application of the senses,’ which is an attempt to help us utilize all five senses as we picture the Gospel events. His thin volume of meditation exercises with its stress on the imagination had tremendous impact for good upon the sixteenth century…

Take a single event like the resurrection, or a parable, or a few verses, or even a single word and allow it to take root in you. Seek to live the experience, remembering the encouragement of Ignatius of Loyola to apply all our senses to our task … As you enter the story, not as a passive observer but as an active participant, remember that since Jesus lives in the Eternal Now and is not bound by time, this event in the past is a living present-tense experience for Him. Hence, you can actually encounter the living Christ in the event, be addressed by his voice and be touched by his healing power. It can be more than an exercise of the imagination; it can be a genuine confrontation.”

(Celebration of Discipline)

 

Visualization, in reality, is a powerful means by which the demonic realm is engaged and experienced.

 

 Hand Posture

“Sit in a comfortable position with both of your hands closed. As your fists are clenched, prayerfully consider the different burdens in your life. Imagine each demand or task being held in your hands. Take your time sharing all of the details and dynamics of each of these demands or responsibilities. As you begin to share the emotional, mental and physical fatigue associated with managing these areas of your life on your own begin opening your hands. As you hold open your hands palms up, imagine handing over each of these burdens to God. Repeat this process with each burden.”

(Personal Spiritual Retreat Guide, Saddleback Church)

 

In yoga, hand positions called “mudras” are used to engage the spirit-body connection. Gertrud Hirschi, in her book Mudras: Yoga in Your Hands, writes: “mudras engage certain areas of the brain and/or soul and exercise a corresponding influence on them.” Palm up is the mudra for giving and receiving.  

In Celebration of Discipline, Foster describes the steps of praying “Palms Down, Palms Up”:   

“Begin by placing your palms down as a symbolic indication of your desire to turn over any concerns you may have to God. Inwardly you may pray, “Lord, I give to You my anger toward John. I release my fear of my dentist appointment this morning. I surrender my anxiety over not having enough money to pay the bills this month. I release my frustration over trying to find a baby-sitter for tonight.” Whatever it is that weighs on your mind or is a concern to you, just say, “Palms down.” Release it. You may even feel a certain sense of release in your hands.

After several moments of surrender, turn your palms up as a symbol of your desire to receive from the Lord. Perhaps you will pray silently: “Lord, I would like to receive Your divine love for John, Your peace about the dentist appointment, Your patience, Your joy.” Whatever you need, say, “Palms up”. Having centred down, spend the remaining moments in complete silence. Do not ask for anything. Allow the Lord to commune with your spirit, to love you. If impressions or directions come, fine; if not, fine.”

 

This method of praying is entirely absent from the Bible. Foster and Saddleback church have again drawn from mysticism’s dark practices, and recommended just one other occultic means to engage the demonic spirit realm.

 

Silence – Stilling the Mind through Rhythmic Breathing

“Just as we often close our eyes when we pray in order to focus our attention on God, breathing is another way in which we can turn our attention towards him. There is nothing magical in deep breathing. However, when you take deep breaths from your stomach, slowly exhaling, it naturally has a way of slowing you down and relaxing the body. That is helpful as you turn your attention towards God…

Now spend the next 10 minutes sitting in silence. You will want to start by entering into a slower rhythm of breathing. Make sure to inhale deeply and then slowly exhale.”

(Silence and Solitude, Saddleback Church

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/sb-web/saddleback.com/connect/ministry/retreat-center/Saddleback+Church+-+Silence+And+Solitude+Booklet+-+Interactive.pdf)

 

This is a well-known meditation technique in Eastern Mysticism. It is a practice which converts from Eastern religions to Christianity, in the past, renounced and ceased – because it was an integral part of their false religion and not of the new; and they recognised the entities they had encountered through meditation now for what they were, demon spirits. For example,  Rabi R. Maharaj came from a long line of Brahmin priests and gurus and trained as a yogi. He meditated for many hours each day. Eventually, he became a Christian renouncing Hinduism and ceasing to practice meditation. In his book Death of a Guru, he vividly describes the demonic entities he encountered in meditation. After some years he became involved in a ministry to young Western people who were travelling to the East to do drugs and engage with Eastern religion. Maharaj recognised that the entities they described to him that they had experienced in their drug trips, were exactly the same as those he had encountered in his meditation.

Recent converts from the New Age to Christianity similarly recognise the evil associated with their past meditation – see for example Warren B. Smith Reinventing Jesus Christ: The New Gospel and Steven Bancarz & Josh Peck,  The Second Coming of the New Age: The Hidden Dangers of Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America and Its Churches.

Smith writes:

“The New Age/New Spirituality has continued to make great inroads into the church—particularly in the area of meditation and so-called “contemplative prayer.” Despite grave warnings from many of us that came out of the New Age movement, the church remains extremely vulnerable to deceptive, supernatural experiences that appear to come from God.

We knew from our own New Age involvement that powerful, seemingly “meant to be” spiritual experiences had often been used to draw us closer into the New Age and its various spiritual practices, including meditation and contemplation. And we knew that the same seductive experiences which had led us into the New Age, continued within our meditations and contemplations. Because our spiritual experiences felt so good, we just assumed that what we were experiencing was coming from God. Our meditations and contemplations soon became the primary connecting force that gave us “the feeling” we were on the right track. These daily meditations and contemplations served to reinforce our emerging New Age beliefs, and had the effect of leading us deeper and deeper into the teachings of the New Age/New Spirituality.

For most of us in the New Age, meditation was an integral part of daily life. Because it was so relaxing and felt so good we had no idea that our meditations were opening us up to great deception. Looking back on it now, meditation was the major pipeline through which deceptive spirits impressed upon us their New Age thoughts and teachings. The spiritual “high” that often accompanied our meditations and contemplations seemed to corroborate our emerging New Age belief that we were all “one” because God was “in” everyone and everything. In fact, in my very first meditation I experienced a “mysterious sense of oneness” that I perceived to be my “divine connection” to that oneness. One of the daily lessons I contemplated from A Course in Miracles was “Let me remember I am one with God.”

Ironically, New Age meditation and what is called biblical meditation or contemplative prayer are often the very same practice. One of the clever ploys of our spiritual Adversary has been to repackage eastern mystical New Age meditation as “Christian” meditation and contemplation.”

 

Steven Bancarz & Josh Peck write regarding contemplative prayer:

“This type of prayer is the textbook definition of mindfulness. Contemplative prayer holds the same assumptions about nature of man, God, and prayer as the New Age movement, because it is rehashed mindfulness. It maintains that God is knowable in a state of non-dual awareness, that thought is the barrier between man and God in relationship, that a shift in our consciousness somehow equates to a relationship with a transcendent person, etc. … this is incompatible with what the Bible says about man being separated from God through wicked works, and that the blood of Jesus (not mindfulness) is what brings us into fellowship with God. A three-page journal article on contemplative prayer* written by an ex-professional astrologer accurately summarizes the difference between biblical prayer and contemplative prayer (CP):

“Nowhere in the Bible is prayer a technique or a way to go beyond thinking. Creating a whole theology of prayer apart from the Bible is dangerous, precisely because we are entering an area fraught with subjectivism, truth based on experience, and therefore, an area where we can be deceived. CP teachers tell us that prayer is listening to and having “divine union” with God, but the Bible presents prayer as words and thoughts. CP tells us to focus inward, but the Bible admonishes us to focus outward on the Lord. CP is a misnomer, since it is neither contemplation nor prayer as found in the Bible.”

(*Montenegro, Marcia “Contemplating Contemplative Prayer: Is It Really Prayer?”, Christian Answers for the New Age www.christiananswersforthenewage.org/ Articles_ContemplativePrayer3. html.

 

Warren’s church, therefore, is actively teaching, facilitating and encouraging its members to participate in an unbiblical and New Age/occultic practice. Tragically, most of them probably have no idea of the path Warren is taking them down.

 

Daniel Plan

In early 2011, a year-long health and wellness program was initiated at Saddleback Church. It went under the title of the “Daniel Plan”, disguising itself under the pretence that it was shaped by the prophet Daniel’s example:

“But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way.  Now God had caused the official to show favor and sympathy to Daniel,  but the official told Daniel, “I am afraid of my lord the king, who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other young men your age? The king would then have my head because of you.”

 Daniel then said to the guard whom the chief official had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah,  “Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink.  Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see.”  So he agreed to this and tested them for ten days.

At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food.  So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead.”

(Daniel 1:8-16)

 

Nothing could be further from the truth! It was shaped by three celebrity physicians and best-selling authors, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Daniel Amen, and Dr. Mark Hyman – self-described as a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew – who are all alternative medicine/holistic health practitioners associated with the New Age mind-body-spirit paradigm. These three men were personally recruited by Rick Warren (subsequently Warren published a best-selling book co-authored with Amen and Hyman entitled The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life). Despite the church’s disclaimer that these men were only employed for advise on physical well-being, not spiritual well-being (http://www.danielplan.com/toolsandresources/pastoralresponse), it is just not possible to distinguish the two. Their New Age spiritual beliefs are integral to their medical practices, best-selling books and public appearances.

 

Dr. Mehmet Oz
Dr. Oz is a cardiovascular surgeon at Columbia University’s Presbyterian Hospital who featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show for five years before gaining his own TV show. Oz combines traditional medicine methods with a wide variety of occult/New Age practices.

In Oz’s endorsement of Ainslie MacLeod’s book, The Transformation: Healing Your Past Lives to Realize Your Soul’s Potential, he makes it clear that his approach to physical health is inextricably bound up with his beliefs regarding spiritual health:

“Ainslie MacLeod is at the frontier of exploration into the soul and its profound influence on our physical selves.”

 

In this book, MacLeod teaches how to meditate and contact spirit guides. MacLeod’s own spirit guides – one of them being his deceased Uncle John – say through the book “that we are standing on the brink of the greatest leap in human consciousness in 55,000 years.” MacLeod claimed it was his spirit guides that gave him knowledge and made him an expert.

Just two months after the launch of the Daniel Plan, a program was aired on Oz’s TV show entitled “Psychic Mediums: Are they the New Therapists?” It featured psychic John Edward in a positive light.

In a program aired a year earlier, Oz stated Reiki (also called “energy healing”) was “the most important alternative medicine treatment”. Reiki practitioners use a technique called palm healing through which a “universal energy” is said to be transferred through the palm of the practitioner to the patient in order to encourage emotional or physical healing. Oz’s wife is a Reiki Master.    (See Reiki  )

Oz practices transcendental meditation and follows the teachings of the medium Emmanuel Swedenborg*:

“Oz … says that he has been influenced by the mysticism of Sufi Muslims from Central Turkey, as well as the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist, philosopher, and Christian theologian.

Oz is a practitioner of transcendental meditation.

“When I meditate, I go to that place where truth lives”, he said. “I can see what reality really is, and it is so much easier to form good relationships then.”

In the November/December 2007 issue of Spirituality and Health, a glossy bimonthly devoted to New Age topics, Oz co-authored an article titled “Mehmet Oz Finds His Teacher,” about how his wife Lisa introduced him to the theology of Swedenborg (Dr. Oz’s wife Lisa is from the Swedenborgian community of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania).

In my practice I have struggled to provide holistic healing. For example, helping a transplant recipient deal with the emotional crisis of a rejecting heart is often more of a challenge than the surgery itself. Nothing in science can address the hopelessness we feel when our hearts fail us completely, or give us comfort when we face the possibility of our own death or the loss of a loved one. As a physician, I seek to connect with my patients on both the physical and spiritual levels, since true healing is never about curing just the body. Although I rarely mention him by name, Swedenborg has made this easier for me.”

(www.swedenborg.org/famous-swedenborgians/dr-mehmet-oz/)

 

*Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) is widely regarded as the father of modern spiritualism – “At the age of 55, Swedenborg had a series of clairvoyant visions, which, he said, gave him the ability to experience the spiritual dimensions … A year or so after these initial visions, Swedenborg abandoned all other pursuits and devoted his time to spiritual meditation and mediumistic trances during which he explored the spirit world.  He claimed to have conversed with biblical prophets, apostles, Aristotle, Socrates, and Caesar, as well as with numerous deceased friends and acquaintances and spirits from other planets….

Of the Adam and Eve story, Swedenborg reported that everything in the story is symbolic, Adam representing the intellectual side of man and Eve the emotional. The great Flood, he said, was not a physical deluge, but a flood of monstrous evils that overwhelmed the people in ancient times. Noah and his family represented those who had not succumbed to the immoralities of the time. Many other stories in the Old Testament, at least before Abraham, were similarly allegorical, Swedenborg was informed during his trances.

Perhaps the most significant discovery by Swedenborg was the “world of spirits,” an intermediate region between the heaven and hell of Protestant theology, but unlike the purgatory of Catholicism, which was much like hell.  The conditions of the spirit world that Swedenborg explored were very similar to earth, so similar that many newly arrived souls had to be told that they were no longer on the earth plane.  It was in this world of spirits that newly arrived souls found themselves.

“When the soul thus separates himself, he is received by good spirits, who likewise do him all kind offices whilst he is in consort with them,” he wrote. “If, however, his life in the world was such that he cannot remain associated with the good, he seeks to be disunited from them also, and this separation is repeated again and again, until he associates himself with those whose state entirely agrees with that of his former life in the world, among whom he finds, as it were, his own life.  They then, wonderful to relate, live together a life of similar quality to that which had constituted their ruling delight when in the body…

Swedenborg did not think it wise for the average person to commune with spirits because of the risks involved in being negatively influenced by low-level spirits….

Swedenborg’s writings are said to have influenced Goethe, Balzac, Coleridge, Carlyle, Lincoln, Tennyson, Emerson, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thoreau, both Brownings, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, George MacDonald, and Helen Keller to name just some.”

(http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/entry/swedenborg_a_genius_who_explored_the_afterlife)

 

Dr. Daniel Amen

Dr. Amen is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, best-selling author, and medical director of the Amen Clinics for Behavioural Medicine. Amen utilises single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging for purported diagnostic purposes. His marketing of SPECT scans and much of what he says about the brain and health has been condemned by scientists and doctors as lacking scientific validity and being unethical.

In his book Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, he encourages readers to

“Learn and use self-hypnosis and meditation on a daily basis.”

 

Amen specifically recommends a Hindu meditation technique called Kirtan Kriya. It involves singing the sounds, Saa Taa Naa Maa (translated as the Hindu belief in the cycle of life – infinity, life, death, rebirth) along with repetitive finger movements, or mudras.  Kriya Kirtan is a form of Kundalini Yoga and is, therefore, rooted in the concept of inner divinity and that Kundalini (or serpent power) is the latent spiritual energy activated through meditation.

In his book The Brain in Love, Amen recommends tantric sex. He writes:

“…tantra yoga teachers recommend meditative practices that also share elements with Kundalini yoga, where subtle streams of energy are raised in the body by means of posture, breath control, and movements.”

 

He claimed that the brain activity that occurs during chanting meditation as similar to that which takes place during the feeling of love and sexual activity.

 

Dr. Mark Hyman

Dr. Hyman is the founder and medical director of The UltraWellness Center and author of the best-selling book The UltraMind Solution:  Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First. Hyman is a proponent of “functional medicine”, a controversial form of alternative medicine that purports to be able to identify and treat the root causes of diseases. He is the board president of clinical affairs for the Institute for Functional Medicine. He was the editor-in-chief of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, a peer reviewed journal that included New Age mind-body-spirit articles on topics such as meditation, guided imagery, yoga, spiritualism, touch therapy, bioenergy, acupuncture, mindfulness etc.

In his book The UltraMind Solution, Hyman argues that impaired physical functions are the cause of the epidemic of society’s mental problems:

“…the core systems of your body – nutrition, immune function, digestion, detoxification, energy metabolism, and mind-body – explain all the symptoms and diseases we think are “brain” problems [i.e. depression, anxiety, ADD, autism, dementia etc.]. In truth, these are simply imbalances in the body that show up in the brain.”

 

Hyman offers advice on repairing the imbalances. He emphasises mystical meditation:

“You have to learn tools to actively relax such as meditation, yoga, deep breathing, hypnosis … The Tibetan monks used meditation, which is very easy to learn … Mindfulness meditation is a powerful well-researched tool, developed by Buddhists, but now practiced and used all over the world … Pray, chant, dance and celebrate. All these are ancient tools for healing … Practice tai qi quan or qi gong. These are ancient, energy balancing tools…”

(The Ultramind Solution)

His Recommended Resources in The Ultramind Solution include New Age practitioners under the following titles:

  1. Relaxation Sources,
    • Jon Kabat-Zinn
    • Healing Rhythms – www.wilddivine.com
    • Belleruth Naparastek’s Guided Imagery Centre
    • Academy for Guided Imagery
    • Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine

 

  1. Restorative and Educational Retreats,
    • Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health
    • Omega Institute
    • Shambhala Mountain Center

 

Hyman endorsed a New Age book Power Up Your Brain—The Neuroscience of Enlightenment (other endorsements for the book are given by New Age leaders Bernie Siegel and Greg Braden). It is co-authored by shaman/medium Alberto Villoldo and neurologist David Perlmutter. The foreword from the publisher states:

“And now two men, two seers—a shaman* and a scientist—are combining their experiences and expertise to explore the totality that includes all of the spirit world and all of the scientific world—as One.”

 

*A shaman – or witchdoctor – is a medium who through an altered state of consciousness perceives into and interacts with the spirit world in order to direct and channel transcendental energies from the spirit world into the physical world.

 

In his endorsement, Hyman reveals his belief in shamanism and the link between physical and spiritual health in the New Age. He writes:

“The shaman and physician for millennia were the same person until the 19th century when they were split apart in the name of science. Now through the lens of 21st-century science, Villoldo and Perlmutter bring them back together, illuminating the web that links together our physical and metaphysical energy. For anyone feeling a loss of energy of body or soul, Power Up Your Brain is your guide to restoration and rejuvenation of your deepest energies.”

 

In their book, Villoda and Perlmutter write:

“For it had become clear to us that access to the Great Spirit or Divine Energy—that natural force which is called by so many names—is available to all. In a sense we are all shamans, and the most advanced teachings in cellular biology are validating lifestyle activities that for centuries, have been paving the way to enlightenment through meditative practices not just for the chosen few but for all who care to learn. Our collaboration explores the implications of this not only for individuals but for all of humanity…”

During my [Villoda] years studying with the shamans, I learned about their belief in the Divine Mother, which we each have the potential to discover in nature. This was not the bearded old man whose image I had come to associate with “God.” Rather, this was a force that infused all creation, a sea of energy and consciousness that we all swim in and are part of. I came to understand that our Western notions of the divine are perhaps a masculine version of this life force that infuses every cell in our bodies, that animates all living beings, and that even fuels stars.”

(Power Up Your Brain—The Neuroscience of Enlightenment)

 

Power Up Your Brain includes a chapter recommending various “Shamanic Exercises” that include an invocation to the “Great Serpent.”

 

It is unconscionable for a ‘Christian’ pastor to expose his congregation to these New Age advocates. Isn’t it wholly reasonable to expect that because of Warren’s endorsement and promotion of Dr.s Oz, Amen and Hyman as men who provide valid advice for physical well-being, that these men would also be looked to by members of his church for advice on mental well-being? Consequently, if they do, they will be stepping into the dark world of the New Age, though unwarned, unprepared and (perhaps) naïve. Thereby, tragically opening themselves up to demonic deception – a false (New Age) Christ, pantheism and universalism.

Indeed, the church’s own Daniel Plan website in 2013 posted an article on a breathing technique promoted as a means to reduce stress written by Dr. Joel Khan (http://danielplan.com/blogs/dp/how-to-manage-your-stress-in-76-seconds/), a clinical Professor of Medicine who “lectures widely on the cardiac benefits of vegan nutrition and mind body practices”. It is specifically a Yoga meditation practice referred to as “4-7-8” – breath in for 4 seconds, hold the breath for 7 seconds, and exhale for 8 seconds. Importantly, Khan states to “Place the tip of your tongue up against the roof of your mouth. Keep it there through the entire breathing process.” In Kundalini Yoga this tongue position is understood as necessary to complete the ‘energy circuit’.

Khan’s own website is linked to in the church’s article (https://www.mindbodygreen.com/). It contains a wealth of information on mindfulness, meditation and spirituality: “Look inward and outward to explore questions of the universe, the spirit, and the self.” When the term “spirituality” is used, it is referring to the Eastern religion idea that ‘god’ is in everyone (i.e. the divinity within or higher self). Khan’s spirituality is nothing less than New Age teaching dressed up with medical credentials. It is anti-Biblical and anti-Christ.

Either breathing or mantra exercises produce the same result, the stilling of the mind. And a passive mind in a meditative state is all that is necessary to engage the demonic spirit world. Saddleback church is culpable in potentially leading a multitude of participants in the Daniel Plan right into the heart of the New Age and the arms of Satan.

 

Ecumenism

Finally, those who champion spiritual formation which is sourced from the Catholic mystics, are typically also advocates for ecumenism i.e. the reunification of the Protestant and Catholic Churches. And Warren’s ecumenism is renowned. For example, at a Catholic conference in 2016 in which Warren gave an address to an audience of Catholic priests and nuns entitled “The Purpose Driven Catholic” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR3dj23oV2k), in the priest’s introduction to Warren he said:

“…Rick Warren…is a friend of many of the leaders in the Catholic Church…he is a central leader in our evangelical outreach to Catholicism and also in Evangelical and Catholic dialogue… He founded and is current pastor of the Saddleback Christian Church…[which] reaches out to many faiths.”

What this priest means by the “evangelical outreach to Catholicism” is the attempt by the Catholic church to pull the Protestant church back under its control. 

In his address, Warren referred to his Catholic audience as “brothers and sisters” and fellow “believers”. And stated that Catholics and Protestants are united in a common faith:

“There are 2.3 billion people who would say I’m a Christian. Who claim the name of Christ. Now they’re not all my tribe, they’re not all your tribe. But if you love Jesus we’re on the same team.”

 

He went on to reiterate, by quoting what he had said recently at a pastors’ conference that comprised both Protestant and Catholic leaders that:

“We’re all here from different brands and different tribes but … we’re on the same team.”

 

Warren deceptively disregards and ignores the Catholic Church’s distortion of the Bible’s teaching and its aberrant practices,. The Catholic Jesus is not the true Jesus. The Catholic Jesus appears physically in the Eucharist. And salvation is by strict adherence to the Catholic Church’s stipulated sacraments and not by faith in the atoning blood sacrifice of Jesus. The divide between Protestants and Catholics on faith and practice is as wide and real as ever. Thus, Warren is a pied piper leading gullible and naïve Protestants over the precipice of falsehood to fall into the miry pit of the antichrist Catholic Church.

 

The Roman Catholic Church

The Roman Catholic Church is called by many ‘Christian’ but that is far from the truth – it is a cult like the Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses.

Catholicism preaches a false gospel – salvation is through works (the sacraments) and not through faith in Christ alone.

It presents a false Christ – the eucharist, where magically the body and the blood of ‘Jesus’ appear, transformed from the wafer and the wine.

It practices a false baptism – only those who submit to the Pope and are baptised into the Catholic Church (not Christ) are declared saved (provided, of course, if they live past infancy into adulthood that they dutifully perform the sacraments).

It believes in a false ‘scriptures’ – the Catholic Church defines the ‘Word of God’ to be the Bible together with the ‘Traditions’ of the church. (The Traditions are completely antagonistic to the Bible and form the basic directives for most of the corrupt practices Catholics.)

It operates under the control of a false priesthood – the Papacy, archbishops, bishops and priests who stand between God and the people.

It worships a false Godhead – the Catholic Church deifies Mary; they worship and pray to her, declaring her to be the Mother of God, a title never found in the Scriptures, thereby making her equal to God.

 

See also Ecumenism   Purpose Driven  Global Peace Plan